rubykittyruby

  It won't be long until the blackberries are ripe & ready for picking.  Which means that every time I go for a walk along a country lane or down to the allotment, I'll go armed with either an empty sandwich box or a plastic bag.  Before long the freezer will be full to overflowing with berries, and I'll have enough soft fruit to add to my breakfast porridge to last the winter.  But in the meantime ...  During this third heatwave of the summer I'm largely staying indoors.  Which seems a shame when the sun's shining brightly, but it's so hot I feel like I'm going to melt.  I've started reading this historical novel, set during the reign of Henry IV, and it's very enjoyable so far.  The heroine's self assured and strong willed, and determined to safeguard her family's precarious wealth and social position.  She's not especially likeable, but sometimes characters are more interesting if the reader's doesn't wholly like or admire ...

  When I've not been picking strawberries off the allotment - they just keep on ripening - or reading Barbara Kingsolver's fabulous 'Flight Behaviour', or when I've not been trying to tackle the wildly dishevelled June greenery in my garden or moving furniture and cheese plants around in an effort to have a tidy house - I should give that up as a hopeless task - I've been dabbling in various crafty pursuits.   I've finished the scroll-like piece that I made as part of this month's Stitch Art group, based around an exhibition by Roger Ackling.  It only really makes any sense if you look at his artwork (and even then it doesn't make a massive amount of sense!).  But I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, and I've added it to the fabric book I made to collect up all my Stitch Art efforts.   I was hoping to roll this up into a scroll, like you would with a snippet roll, but including cardboard put paid to that.  So I folded it up and made a b...

  It's been one of those restless kind of days, beginning awkwardly when the clock radio besides my bed wouldn't tune into the radio station I wanted it to.  The radio's not broken.  It just flatly refused to do anything other than make crackling, hissing noises at me, like a thing possessed.  Very disconcerting.  Then I somehow broke a glass that'd been on my bedside table.  One of my nice Harvey Nicks tumblers too.  No idea why it shattered, but it did.  A malevolent poltergeist?  Nah, more like a still-sleepy me being clumsy.  Anyway, the restlessness has continued all day, and resulted in a lot of tea drinking and snacking.  Far too much snacking!  You know when you buy a multi-pack of chocolate bars and think I'll be sensible and ration them out, eating one a day ... yeah, well it wasn't a one-a-day kind of day.  I've eaten 'em all!  On the crafting front, I managed to get myself together enough to make some pain...

  I've been spending a lot of time gell printing.  Cutting up prints, gluing them down, cutting them up again.  I had in mind to make a stack of postcards, but wasn't massively impressed by my results.  I mean, they're okay, but they're lacking something.  Not sure what.   I know lots of people add lettering to their collages and handmade cards, along the lines of ' hold on to your dreams ' and ' be kind '.  But I'm ambivalent about those additions.  Maybe I've seen too many cringeworthy ' Live! Laugh! Love! ' style messages emblazoned on everything from kids tee shirts to coffee mugs and even peoples kitchen walls.  The wording can seem too cheesy for my liking, but each to their own.  It'd be a boring world if we all liked the same thing.   I've also been making a stack of painted papers.  The sheets of lightly coloured A3 are being cut and folded into individual small booklets, then having cardboard covers added....